Three Bangladeshi entrepreneurs of the tech and start-up have been named in the Rest of World (RoW)'s 100 Global Tech's Changemakers list, for their contributions to the tech sector,
They are SBK Tech Venture’s founder and managing director Sonia Bashir Kabir, ShopUp’s CEO Afeef Zaman, and Pickaboo’s CEO Morin Talukder.
SBK Tech Ventures is a Bangladesh-focused venture capital (VC) fund which invests in startups that support the digital development of rural areas, founded by Sonia Bashir Kabir, and its current portfolio includes more than 40 startups across fintech, health tech, edu tech blockchain, and B2B SaaS to e-commerce.
For her role in democratizing technology and empowering women with technology, Kabir had also won several global awards including the prestigious Bill Gates Founders award and United Nations SDG Pioneer award and earlier played the role of the managing director of Microsoft Bangladesh, Myanmar, Nepal, Bhutan and Laos.
"I am so bullish about the startup ecosystem of Bangladesh. We could not have been in a better time than now in Bangladesh. We will see huge success as our market is poised for take-off. Laser precision execution for a solid blueprint is the need of the hour for our startups," she told Dhaka Tribune.
Afeef Zaman, on the other hand, as the CEO of ShopUp, has been focusing on solving problems in emerging markets, especially in Bangladesh, where around 4.5 million popular mom-and-pop stores struggle to access the country’s formal financial system due to a lack of digital presence.
ShopUp is Bangladesh's largest full-stack B2B commerce platform for micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs), and through the platform, Afeef has been helping the MSMEs in accessing digital credit, B2B sourcing, and providing logistics, and business management solutions.
Last year the platform added funds worth $34 million in a series B extension round, after raising South Asia's largest funding round worth $75 million in 2021.
Morin Talukder, who also made it to the list is the co-founder and CEO of Pickaboo, a Bangladesh-based e-commerce platform, that has been attempting to blur the lines between the online and offline retail market for the local smartphone and gadget segment with its omnichannel strategy, a segment that is estimated to be a $2 billion market in the electronics category.
Since launching in 2016, Pickaboo has aspired to be one of the leading platforms to sell mobile and gadgets and sees a realistic path to becoming a unicorn - a contemporary business term for a billion-dollar company, relying on its omnichannel strategy.
An omnichannel strategy is a method that helps businesses create a seamless experience for customers across all the channels through which it sells, encompassing the online and offline touchpoints of a brand, from a point-of-sale system to social media-shoppable post, and it is not just for retailers anymore.
Under Morin, Pickaboo has been trying to scale up in building a sustainable differentiation to break out in the market, making drastic changes to its business model over the past three years and becoming the first e-commerce in Bangladesh to introduce monthly payment plans and customer membership plans.
“We have continuously been trying to strategize customer-centric services that are still unique to the market. For instance, we have launched a three-hour delivery facility, our goal is to blur the line between offline and online,” Morin told Dhaka Tribune.
The Pickaboo CEO is also known as a veteran of the sector having founded the online shopping platform ehatbazaar.com in 2015, which he sold a year later to focus on Pickaboo.
Earlier this year, RoW set out to identify 100 of the most influential, innovative, and trailblazing personalities in fintech, e-commerce, policy, digital infrastructure, and a range of other sectors that intersect with and influence technology.
Having had a major impact outside of Silicon Valley and the West, where the majority of the world's population live, the three Bangladeshis made it to the list.
An e-CAB (e-commerce Association of Bangladesh) top official told Dhaka Tribune that two out of three named Bangladeshi entrepreneurs being from the e-commerce sector speaks volumes about the potential of the sector and its growth and is a proud moment for Bangladesh.